I am new to Motion and after installing it and beginning to play around a bit I am surprised at how often it locks up and the beach bal spins and spins and spins often resulting in the program "Not Responding". This is happening without a file even being open. I am running a 2009 Mac Pro (2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon) with 24GB RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB graphics card. Shouldn't this handle Motion with ease? What am I missing?

How are you up to date with your OS and Motion? Try deleting your user preferences
This is for running really slow.
It all depends on your Project. Our baseline (minimum) Macs are Dual 2.93GHz 6 Core from 32GB with ATi Radeon HD 5870 1GB cards.
Motion will still put these Macs on it's knees. It is the way it is designed.
This is how Motion works, it uses the RAM to cache all objects in your preview, the Processor is used to calculate the math for the curves/paths, behaviors and particles, the number crunching jobs and the VRAM represents the frames of your project.

As you can see the Graphic card can be the Achilles heel. You just have to work smart with your projects, for example hide the layers that you already have set and don't need to preview building your composite. Have your particles displayed as points... when your done designing them.
Don't forget you can work in proxies modes (Resolution) under the Render settings Full, Half, Third or Quarter plus other option like Motion Blur or the quality.

I hope this helps. Still have any question let them out.

Thx Srubelicious.
Yes, I have tried resetting my preferences to no avail and I am fully up to date as far as updates go. I fully understand your points and he way in which Mtion uses the CPU, GPU an RAM. I am thinking of upgrading the graphics card but I'm not ure th issue that I'm experiencing is due to insufficien hardware. As stated before I am getting the spinning beach ball without even having a fIle open. I am using an application (forgot the name as am not in front of my computer) that monitors CPU, GPU and RAM loads and none of them are loaded when I experience the spinning beach ball. This is what has me in a quandary. I'm not sure what could be causing this. It would make sense if I was working on some intense file with complex layers but I can't even ge ap preview of a default Motion template to show in the project selector window without the spinning beach ball / not responding. Any ideas?

How often do you shut down your machine? I have made the experience that Motion runs faster after a fresh machine startup.
(a lowly i7 MBP with 8GB RAM)

Yes, sounds like a potential maintenance issue on your Mac. While Motion may be more resource intensive than most apps, I would think you might see some issues with other apps also. Try the usual routine, repair permissions, trash preferences, etc. This may help.

Thx dgwvideo.... I generally keep up with repairing permissions and I have trashed permissions multiple times. I'm just not sure what else to try. Let me ask you a question.....when you start up Motion and the Project Browser pops up (if you have your preferences setup to allow for the project browser)....when you select a composition in the left sidebar and then select a specific template in the middle selector box.....does a preview begin for you in the black rectangular box in the right sidebar? I get nothing but a black box. What to try next????????

Only a few have previews, most do not, so don't worry about that.

Hey cgbier....with your setup do you experience lag? If you are not having issues then I know that I'm having some issue other than hardware.

BenB....I'm not gett ANY previews

So, I fixed the issue!!!!!

Not sure if this is a fix for everyone but here goes:
First I tried to create a new admin user and opened Motion to see if there were other issues at a system level. This changed nothing. Next I went back to my original user and opened (~/library/quicktime) and right clicked on any file within the folder......while right clicking I pressed the option/alt key which changed the contextual menu to display "Show Inspector" instead of "Get Info." Then select "Show Inspector" and that will pop up the info window. scroll through each file in the quicktime folder and watch for any files that are in the folder that are NOT copyrighted to Apple. Remove the files that are not Apple copyrighten and place then in a folder on your desktop. Now reopen Motion and see if that worked. This fixed my issue as I must have had a quicktime file conflict. Also I had Perian installed in system preferences and I uninstalled it as well. Once I got Motion working again I one by one moved the quicktime files back into the folder and tried Motion to find the culprit file.

Hope this helps!

Did you try running "Preference Manager" at any time to trash Motion's pref files?

Also, what specific file did you find was causing the problems?

BTW, Perian is End-Of-Life now and won't be updated or supported any longer. So yes, just remove it. It's caused problems in the past, too.

Yes, I did run "Preference Manager" . Many times in fact. I think it ended being 3xiv codec (can't even remember why I had that junky codec in there anyway.